English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Pierre Audi, now the directeur général of the Festival d’Aix as well as the artistic director of New York City’s Park Avenue Armory opens a new era for this distinguished opera festival in the south of France with a new work by the Festival’s signature composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It is, namely, Mozart’s last work, a Requiem Mass left unfinished at his death in 1791, later finished —based on Mozart’s notes and sketches by his student Franz Saver Süssmayr. In this Aix edition it has been reconfigured and expanded by French musical visionary Raphaël Pichon, a conductor well-known at the Aix Festival, and by Italian theater visionary Romeo Castelucci in a belated, long awaited Aix debut.
But this “Mozart” Requiem is now a theater piece somewhat beyond, actually well beyond Mozart’s setting of the Catholic death mass liturgy. His widow Constanza pretended he composed his own requiem, and in Aix it was indeed just that — Mozart’s moment of life long vanished, conceptually the “Aix” Requiem insists that Mozart’s Requiem Mass will vanish as well.
Discovering this existential tragedy made the Castelucci Aix debut well worth the wait. In his Brussels Parsifal, his Lyon Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher and his Salzburg Salome Sig. Castelucci is fettered by narrative, and imposed philosophical concept and psychological involvement. But in this Aix Requeim, like in his Tragedia Endogonidia cycle, he freely traverses ephemeral human atmospheres filled with unanswered questions that are met with spontaneous reactions. It is rare access to the most hidden theatrical realms of the human psyche.
Like the non-verbal, purely intuitive communicative process of music Castelucci’s language is the non-verbal communicative power of essential theater. There is no intelligence and there is no interpretation, there is but momentary recognitions of an intuited physical reality.
From its first moment in this Aix Requiem, a lone, older woman is perhaps at her death, the requiem passes through her four, simultaneous existences in identically dressed embodiments — a child, a virgin, a mother, and this old woman. The Aix Requiem ends with their issue — a baby alone on the silent stage. A male.
Musically the Requiem begins with the disembodied voice of a male child (soprano) intoning an anonymous Gradual (a response refrain normally sung between recitation of psalms): “Christus factus est.” It insists that the will of God be imposed on man. It is sung in the purest sounds of male innocence.
The usual requiem liturgies of praise and pain continue though interspersed by conductor Pichon with other Mozartian moments — a Masonic hymn, a Psalm setting, the reuse of a piece from his incidental music to Thamos Roi d’Egypte, a solfeggio (sung by the boy), an Amen, the parody of a Serenade, a church song. The Aix Mozart Requiem ends with again the lone voice of the boy intoning an anonymous “In Paradisum” (sung at the moment the body exits the church) — the will of God fulfilled.
There passed before our eyes an abstracted cruxifiction (the young girl), a forest, a maypole, a wrecked car, the Pygmalion chorus and four soloists of purest voices (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) intoning the liturgies first in the clothes they wore to the theater (a heat-wave in Aix), transforming themselves in courtly white unisex dresses, then in celebratory courtly crimson unisex robes, finally in muslin tunics for the "Agnus Dei" before decaying into a chiaroscuro mass of naked bodies. The complex choruses issued forth while the singers created the structures of the music in abstracted movement, often dance, impeccably carving the interlocking phrases of Mozart’s fugues to construct the technical grandeur of mankind’s accomplishment.
The coup de théâtre was the cataclysm that occurred in the "Communion" of the requiem liturgy, the souls becoming one with God shouting their jubilation, tearing down the white walls of the world. The floor of the stage slowly rose, becoming vertical, the debris of the wall and black dirt of the world randomly sliding down to reveal, finally, a blank, white wall. Death. Silence.
From beginning of the Requiem to its end continuous words streamed across the stage box, naming the now vanished accomplishments of man and nature. The final words, incised, were July 5, 2019 — the day I saw the Aix Requiem.
With, then, the lone male child — the creator — alone on the stage we were left with the finality of death, and the image of creation. There was no comfort in rebirth.
The stage was the music, and the music was the stage. Maestro Pichon’s Pygmalion orchestra of period instruments was the voice and the world of man, the solo winds of purest sound, of psychological innocence, the solfeggio violin duet with the boy soprano giving corpus to nature. The eloquence of the requiem liturgies ceaselessly emerged from the pit in crystal clear phrasing that created profound, truly human embodiment for this mass of death.
This Mozart / Pichon / Castelucci Requiem occurred in the most minimal terms. The chorus sang without score, the stage was but a white box. It was sublime music made alive in pure theater.
Michael Milenski
Cast and production information:
Conductor: Raphaël Pichon; Mise en scène, scénographie, costumes, lumière: Romeo Castellucci; Collaboratrice à la mise en scène et aux costumes: Silvia Costa; Dramaturgie:
Piersandra di Matteo. Chorus and Orchestra: Pygmalion. Soprano: Siobhan Stagg; Alto: Sara Mingardo; Ténor: Martin Mitterrutzner; Basse: Luca Tittoto; Enfant chanteur: Elias Pariente. Théâtre de l’Archeveché, Aix-en-Provence, July 5, 2019.